Initiative at Brown's Annenberg Institute aims to advance research on schools and climate change

The initiative published an inaugural report in July titled “Education and Climate Change: Synthesizing the Evidence to Guide Future Research” — a working paper that outlines the main points of connection between these areas and offers a roadmap for future research. Kraft co-authored the paper with Project Director Grace Falken and Research Associate Sohil Malik.

Kraft noted that the frequency of environmental disasters — including heat waves, winter storms, flooding, hurricanes and wildfires — that cause more than $1 billion in damage has increased from an average of around three per year in the early 1980s to approximately 23 annual disasters in recent years, according to federal data.

“These are increasingly common threats to schools, to infrastructure, and to students, teachers and staff, and we can see that threat bearing out in real, direct impacts on school operations and their budgets,” Kraft said. “We know that extreme weather events were responsible for 83% of school closures lasting a week or more between 2011 and 2019.”

In addition to making its research widely available, leaders at the Sustainable Education Research Initiative plan to host public research seminars, publish policy memos, develop interactive online reports for students, educators and administrators, and produce free toolkits.

“Schools are both vulnerable to the growing effects of climate change and vital to the solution,” Kraft said. “By mapping the research landscape, we aim to help advance interdisciplinary scholarship and illustrate why climate change is an urgent education policy issue.”